Thursday, September 21, 2017

Hurricane Maria delivered a devastating blow to the mobile networks in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

As of September 21, 2017 at 11:00 AM EDT, FCC data showed that 95% of cell sites in Puerto Rico are out of service. Critically, 48 out of the 78 counties in Puerto Rico have 100% of their cell sites out of service even nearly 24 hours after the storm passed. The FCC database shows that there are 1,789 base stations in Puerto Rico and 1,703 are down.

In the U.S. Virgin Islands, 77% of cell sites are out of service.

With the widespread power outages in Puerto Rico it is assumed that cable Internet services are also offline for most customers, but the FCC had not received any data on the status of the networks.

At this week's ECOC 2017 in Sweden, Lumentum showcased several 400G transceivers including QSFP-DD FR4, DR4, and OSFP FR4. The QSFP-DD and OSFP transceivers comply with the QSFP-DD Multi-Source Agreement (MSA) and OSFP MSA respectively.

Lumentum showed several advanced modulators supporting 100G, 200G, and 400G applications. The company is actively engaged with both the OIF and customers to define next generation modulators utilizing both Indium Phosphide (InP) and Silicon Photonics (SiP) technologies.

Lumentum also displayed an OFM whitebox, or "greybox", that combines the northbound interface for integration with existing geographic information system (GIS) and operations support system (OSS) solutions. The whitebox can be used for online optical cable monitoring, alarming, fault analysis and positioning which can alleviate the need to send personnel to test and evaluate systems in the field.

Another highlight at the Lumentum booth was its wide portfolio of 100G Transceivers, including:

4WDM-10, 20: compact 100G transceivers supporting links of up to 10km and 20km on duplex single-mode fiber extending the reach of CWDM4 and LR4 platforms through the use of FEC on the host card. Supporting both Ethernet and OTN rates with a maximum power dissipation of 3.5W.

Peter C. Chang, the founder and chairman of the board at Alliance Fiber Optic Products (AFOP), was charged with insider trading by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in the sale of AFOP to Corning in 2016 for $305 million. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California is also bringing criminal charges against Chang.

The SEC charges that Chang generated more than $2 million in illicit profits and losses avoided by trading on nonpublic information and tipping his brother ahead of two negative earnings announcements and the company’s merger.

AFOP, which was based in Sunnyvale, California designed and manufactured high-performance passive optical components used by cloud data-center operators and leading datacom and telecom OEMs. Prior to the acquisition, Corning used AFOP products in a number of its existing connectivity solutions. AFOP was founded in 1995 and has manufacturing and product development capabilities in the U.S., Taiwan and China.

Telia Company AB agreed to pay US$965 million in a global settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, U.S. Department of Justice, and Dutch and Swedish law enforcement.

The case, which dates back to 2007, involved Telia's entrance into the Uzbek telecommunications market. Telia paid at least $330 million in bribes to a shell company under the guise of payments for lobbying and consulting services that never actually occurred. The person receiving the bribes is believed to be a daughter of the President of Uzbekistan.

The SEC said Telia has consented to the order to pay $457 million in disgorgement. Telia has also agreed to pay a criminal fine of more than $508 million imposed by the Department of Justice, although portions of each amount could be offset by payments made in overseas settlements or proceedings brought by the Dutch Openbaar Ministerie or the Swedish Åklagarmyndigheten.Statement from Telia

“Today’s settlement brings an end to an unfortunate chapter in Telia Company’s history. Since 2013 the new board and management have worked diligently and responsibly to understand what went wrong, to remedy what has been broken and to regain trust from all our stakeholders. We have come a long way to establish a more sustainable company with a strong focus on governance and compliance but it is a never-ending journey as we aspire to embed this into our culture making sure that all employees understand the importance of doing the right thing all the time. The resolution and related financial sanction that we announce today is a painful reminder of what happens if we don't”, says Telia Company’s President and CEO Johan Dennelind.

Statement from SEC

Corporate bribery is not just unfair and illegal, it has terribly corrosive effects on business, government, and society,” said Stephanie Avakian, Co-Director of the SEC’s Enforcement Division. “As this global settlement demonstrates, the SEC continues to work closely with our counterparts at home and abroad to expose and pursue such corruption.”

ColorChip's 100G product family is now in volume production. The company has invested $80M, secured over the past 2 years, to expand the throughput of its industrialized-optics TOSA/ROSA assembly lines in the Israel based facility and to double the optical module integration and testing floor space to 7,000 square feet in Fabrinet. The devices are based on ColorChip's SystemOnGlass (SOG) TOSA/ROSA platform.

ColorChip said its SystemOnGlassTOSA/ROSA platform can be used for both DML and EML based PAM4 optical engines, providing the pathway to compact, QSFPx-based PAM4 transceivers at data rates of 200G and 400G.

The demo featured a 100G 500m CWDM-Lite datacenter transceiver, accepted by the Open Compute Project (OCP), as well as the MSA compliant 2km CWDM4 and 10km 4WDM-10 offerings. The 100G transceivers are based on uncooled DML's on the CWDM grid and characterized by typical power consumption of 2.6W, highly compact QSFP28 packaging and a standard Duplex LC optical interconnect.

Shipments of 400G coherent WDM volume starts to ramp this year, led by Ciena deployments and then followed by other suppliers six to nine months later, according to a newly-published, bi-annual Optical Applications Report report from Cignal AI, an independent research firm based in Boston. The introduction of small form factor 100G and 400G pluggable models will be a major catalyst.

“Cignal AI has close relationships with equipment and component manufacturers, as well as end users, and these relationships give us a unique insight into the optical equipment market. From this vantage point, we can forecast emerging technologies such as coherent 400G WDM usage,” states Andrew Schmitt, lead analyst for Cignal AI. “Pluggable 400G ZR modules should enter the market by 2019, and they will be the final nail in the coffin for 10G WDM networks.”

Some key findings:

Both 100G and 400G coherent will be widely adopted at the edge of the network by the end of 2021.

Cisco is growing 100G port deployments faster than all other vendors in the market.

Equipment originally designed for DCI applications is rapidly evolving into applications outside the datacenter. Cignal AI is now using "Compact Modular for this class of products.

Spending on compact modular equipment more than tripled in the first half of 2017, compared to the same period last year. Ciena, Cisco, and Infinera are the market share and technology leaders for this sector.

Revenue for packet-OTN systems grew in the double digits in the first half of 2017, compared to the same period last year.

SubCom said it is able to provide global 24x7x365 monitoring coverage and both high-level and regional visibility into a status of subsea systems on behalf of cable operators. The NOC has already been selected for the Monet Submarine Cable, a 10,556km cable consisting of six fibre pairs that is owned and operated by Algar Telecom (a Brazilian telecom company and ISP), Angola Cables (a multinational telecom company operating in the wholesale market), ANTEL (the Uruguayan telecom company) and Google.

“With the ongoing surge in undersea cable investment, more operators are searching for reliable network operations services. They’re finding they need providers that truly understand undersea networks and how to optimize their life cycles,” said Don Rotunno, managing director, sales operations, TE SubCom. “Undersea communications is SubCom’s business and the expertise we’ve amassed over decades in the industry will immediately benefit users of our new NOC solution.”

Preferred Networks (PFN) has launched of a private supercomputer designed to facilitate research and development of deep learning, including autonomous driving and cancer diagnosis.

The new supercomputer, which is one of the most powerful to be developed by the private sector in Japan, uses NTT Com's cloud-based Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) platform. The deployment uses 1,024 of NVIDIA's Tesla multi-node P100 GPUs. Theoretically, the processing speed of the new supercomputer can reach 4.7 PetaFLOPS — a massive 4,700 trillion floating point operations per second.